Jim is the editor of Strategic Intelligence, Chief Global Strategist for West Shore Funds, former general counsel for Long Term Capital Management, and a consultant to the U.S. Intelligence community and U.S. Department of Defense.

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Jim Rickards

The current British Pound recovery will probably not be long lived, but we’ll see how the ‘Brexit’ vote goes on June 23th.

The polls are close but it’s Jim’s view is that ‘Out” will win — they will vote to leave the European Union.

There are a couple of reasons for that:

1. Boris Johnson is very popular.

2. When the good weather comes then the wave of refugees coming from the Middle East is going to increase. It’s difficult to move in the winter so they’ll be moving more in the spring.

All the tensions and issues will increase by then.

They’re bringing in heavy weight hired guns from the United States to run the ‘In’ campaign, which makes Jim think they have concerns.

Concessions which have led David Cameron to say they can stay in have to do with their relationships with the rest of the European Union and regulation, but there are bigger issues here that are not addressed by the concessions, like immigration.

It’s not unlike the situation in the United States.

Donald Trump was underestimated all along and is probably still being underestimated.

Jim thinks the ‘Brexit’ and ‘Out’ movement are being underestimated by the elites.

The elites are usually the last to know.

The more powerful and plugged in you are the more out of touch you are with popular sentiment. So they’re the last to know.

ELITES

What’s really driving this is income inequality and wage stagnation. People are very familiar with it.

More to the point, Larry Summers had a column the other day where he was using Mussolini, Hitler and Trump in the same sentence.

Trump is not an unreasonable person. He’s a little bombastic and hyperbolic, but throwing Mussolini and Hitler in there for good measure is a good example of how the elites, Larry Summers and the leaders in the U.K. included, are out of touch.

They’re in a bubble.

Elites go to dinner. Who do they talk to? Other elites.

They fly around in their jets and go to Davos.

They’re not in touch. Jamie Dimon said Davos is where “billionaires telling millionaires what the middle class feels”. But none of them are in touch.

If there were no actual grievances it wouldn’t matter. It’s fine to be an elite when everything’s good but right now everything is not good.

Wages are stagnant and jobs are being lost.

There’s globalization but there’s also politics. This is a global phenomenon. On top of that Europe has the refugee immigration issue and the terrorism issue.

The Greek bank holiday and long lines to get a few euros for the day. Debt deals behind closed doors. The media telling us what opinions to have. China building islands in the South China Sea and claiming all the international waves. More dealing to come. More standing in line for those who owe. Who owns who? There’s a long line of nations in debt and it’s far from done.

The tension in the South China Sea is growing and China appears to be building new additional islands. Who owns and who owes who?

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Preparing for the Fall live boutique album is available on iTunes — featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings.

The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods, of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace instead have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. The lyrics are by Rudyard Kipling. One of my gurus.

See the bankers wave their Wall Street wands and conjure piles of paper green. Naked short selling is like betting that your neighbour’s house will burn down. In this scenario it actually does burn down. If the bankers win then we lose the whole world as we know it. I wrote this in 2009, with a lyric “A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea, and little pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are bobbing up and down, they’ll send a storm and we’ll see, when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach“, and it’s coming on now. The world is changing as we know it.

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Nothing on this site is intended as individual investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.